CourseSmart's "engagement index" peeks in students' books to see if they read.

There exists a textbook that will report back to your professors about whether you’ve been reading it, according to a report Tuesday from the New York Times. A startup named CourseSmart now offers an education package to schools that allows professors to, among other things, monitor what their students read in course textbooks as well as passages they highlight.

CourseSmart acts as a provider of digital textbooks working with publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and John Wiley and Sons. The NY Times describes books in use at Texas A&M University, which present an “engagement index” to professors that can be used to evaluate students’ performance in class.

The article cites a couple of examples where professors attribute students’ low grades to the CourseSmart-provided proof that the student never, or rarely, opened their books. The engagement index shows not only what, but when, students are reading, so if they opt not to peruse the textbook until the day or night before a test, the professor will know.

Students know that the books are tracking them, but it’s still unclear to all parties involved whether the “engagement index” is a fair or valuable metric. If nothing else, it could be gamed, and it makes assumptions about optimal learning styles. Some students, for instance, may get more out of homework assignments involving working out problems or out of the class itself, while a well-thumbed digital textbook could just as easily be an indicator of a clueless student frantically trying to catch up on hours they spent sleeping or spacing out while the professor was speaking at them.

The NY Times states that CourseSmart is set to broadly introduce the program this coming fall.

Having been in college (albeit before all this newfangled "e-book" gimcrackery), I can assure everyone that this would simply mean pausing between rounds of "hold the bathroom" in Goldeneye 64 long enough to push "page next" on my e-reader. Probably with the occasional quick "page next page back" sequence just to mix it up a little bit.

If I read every single page that my professors assigned to me, I'd be a wreck of a person. If I have 5 classes that require 70 pages of reading per week, that's 350 pages of material per week (or 4,900 pages per 14-week semester). That might be manageable if those were pages from a novel, but many textbooks use much larger pages than the average novel.

I'm a slow-ish reader to begin with. If I read 5,000 page per semester, I'd barely have time to go to the grocery store outside of doing coursework. I'm not against textbooks or reading assignments, but professors need to understand that students have other assignments and obligations from other classes.

That being said, I've only read textbook assignments sparingly throughout most of my semesters. Why would I bother when the professors use the publisher's/author's PowerPoint slides during their lectures?

In my mind, I'm picturing students sitting at their dorm room desk. They "flip" a page once in a while with one hand, a beer in the other, and watch daytime television all while complaining of bordem.

I'm fairly convinced all college does is weed out the truly stupid and people who can't figure out how to cheat or putforth the minimal effort required to get their fancy piece of paper. Some people just don't want to read or study. They're paying to be there. Let them fail out or keep wasting their time and money.

And yet, I keep hearing how professors don't have time to write content, or grade papers or actually teach a class (having personally been the distance learning route), but they have time to micromanage if their students keep each page of the book open long enough?

Unless the teachers tie a grade to the metric, this probably won't change students' behavior any. If the student is a procrastinator or just plain lazy, they won't change overnight just because they know the teacher knows how long they looked (or didn't) at their textbook.

In a distance learning environment, however, It might let the teacher know if a student was cheating on exams, if it time-stamps book access. With my distance learning courses, I would have the book open in a separate window while taking the test to look up any questions i didn't know. With this, the teacher could actually enforce the "closed book" test rule by comparing the book access time-stamp against the test submission time-stamp.

this would be 'gamed' instantly by the one kid who makes an app that flips the pages for you. but that point aside, reading the text is not everything and this would be quickly adopted by lazy teachers as another 'cop-out' for assigning grades (much like mid-terms/finals). our education system is already cursed with tunnel vision and this would only play into that terribleness.

Kudos to CourseSmart for figuring out a new angle on selling ebooks. This isn't going to change anything, though. Students uninterested in learning the material still won't. End of story. At least those students are subsidizing degrees for those who truly do want to learn...

In my mind, I'm picturing students sitting at their dorm room desk. They "flip" a page once in a while with one hand, a beer in the other, and watch daytime television all while complaining of bordem.

I'm fairly convinced all college does is weed out the truly stupid and people who can't figure out how to cheat or putforth the minimal effort required to get their fancy piece of paper. Some people just don't want to read or study. They're paying to be there. Let them fail out or keep wasting their time and money.

Stupid or not academically-inclined... the two, of course, are not synonymous. It's too bad we've gotten into this college or bust mentality. There are plenty of smart, motivated people who would rather be a welder or carpenter or plumber. As it is, those fields are filled with people who have been deemed 'failures' because they couldn't or didn't finish college or even high school. We need intelligent people in the skilled trades, too.

They could try to reduce the "gaming" by performing facial recognition with the webcam on the front of tablets, possibly also checking the eyes to see the student is actually looking at and scanning through the text. Scary stuff! If this system was around when I was studying, the Profs would have hated me and I probably would have failed miserably.... and I just finished my PhD in nuclear physics.

Yeah, having taken and taught college courses, this is a useless idea.

Too easy to game for you to actually infer anything conclusive, and probably too prone to failure to rely on it. The proof pudding is still whether student shows up to class knowing enough to participate and pass exams.

Also, the only way to report on this this would be through on those awful DRM schemes of which publishers are so fond these days. I'd rather have textbooks available to my students in whatever formats are most convenient to them, whether or not that includes always-on tracking software.

I don't think the intent here is to do the assessment of the student based on the amount of reading they did. The intent is to catch that someone is falling behind before they've failed the final and it's too late for them to recover. For that goal, it's not a perfect solution but it's not a bad attempt.

Other studies have shown that students learn more and have less test anxiety if they are quizzed while watching videos of lectures instead of waiting until the end. The same probably also applies to readings, so there may be room to improve still. It also addresses many of the issues about people pretending to read.

A lot of the responses mention how easy it is to game this. So what? The article didn't indicate that students were getting graded by having read the work. It was just extra information for the teacher. You still don't have to read the work if you don't want to. This isn't forcing you to read, since that would be ridiculous. I assume most universities determine your knowledge of the subject matter based on tests, right?

The worst thing that will happen is if you don't read the material AND get low marks, the teacher might say, "Hey, why not try reading the work?"

I would agree that this information is probably not useful enough to make up for implementing the program though.

In my mind, I'm picturing students sitting at their dorm room desk. They "flip" a page once in a while with one hand, a beer in the other, and watch daytime television all while complaining of bordem.

I'm fairly convinced all college does is weed out the truly stupid and people who can't figure out how to cheat or putforth the minimal effort required to get their fancy piece of paper. Some people just don't want to read or study. They're paying to be there. Let them fail out or keep wasting their time and money.

Stupid or not academically-inclined... the two, of course, are not synonymous. It's too bad we've gotten into this college or bust mentality. There are plenty of smart, motivated people who would rather be a welder or carpenter or plumber. As it is, those fields are filled with people who have been deemed 'failures' because they couldn't or didn't finish college or even high school. We need intelligent people in the skilled trades, too.

I basically said college was a waste of time in the first place. And it largely is if you're not learning a trade (which ranges from a two year program to learn how to fix HVACs to multiple years of acaedmia to become a medical doctor). People who know college is a waste of time for their career are clearly smart because they aren't wasting their time or money. If they wanted to learn something for their own edification and personal growth, they can go borrow a book for free from the library and read it in their leisure. I stand by my previous use of truly stupid. (and to be perfectly honest, I think a lot of people are stupid for going to college because so few even know what they are doing there other than they're "supposed" to be there)

And yet, I keep hearing how professors don't have time to write content, or grade papers or actually teach a class (having personally been the distance learning route), but they have time to micromanage if their students keep each page of the book open long enough?

This isn't for the professors.. this is something to sell to administrators. The professors can evaluate as little or as much as they want about your knowledge by their tests depending on how they create the test (outliers and grad classes excluded).

If a law student wants to cram for every test only on the days of those tests, that's his prerogative, since it's largely the case that what one remembers from law school as a practising lawyer is largely a series of inter-related concepts, not the actual cases (case law) from which one learned/inferred them and which formed a large fraction of what you got tested on in those days long ago.

This seems about as effective as making someone scroll to the bottom of an EULA. It doesn't mean I just read it, it means I know how to get through whatever additional steps you throw at me.

I would hope that it's a bit more intuitive than that. At the very least measuring the time spent on each page. Otherwise yeah, it would be equally as effective as an EULA. Just wait until they start to use eye-tracking. Then it might be worth while.

Kudos to CourseSmart for figuring out a new angle on selling ebooks. This isn't going to change anything, though. Students uninterested in learning the material still won't. End of story. At least those students are subsidizing degrees for those who truly do want to learn...

I'm starting as a professor in the fall and all I can say about the is meh. I really don't care whether the students read the text or not. It is their grade after all.

I generally only assign readings to supplement the learning in the lectures and projects that I assign. Now I might feel differently if the textbooks for the subjects I teach weren't so bad. (I generally teach Introductory Marketing Research.) I still wouldn't want to track their reading.

In my mind, I'm picturing students sitting at their dorm room desk. They "flip" a page once in a while with one hand, a beer in the other, and watch daytime television all while complaining of bordem.

I'm fairly convinced all college does is weed out the truly stupid and people who can't figure out how to cheat or putforth the minimal effort required to get their fancy piece of paper. Some people just don't want to read or study. They're paying to be there. Let them fail out or keep wasting their time and money.

Stupid or not academically-inclined... the two, of course, are not synonymous. It's too bad we've gotten into this college or bust mentality. There are plenty of smart, motivated people who would rather be a welder or carpenter or plumber. As it is, those fields are filled with people who have been deemed 'failures' because they couldn't or didn't finish college or even high school. We need intelligent people in the skilled trades, too.

I basically said college was a waste of time in the first place. And it largely is if you're not learning a trade (which ranges from a two year program to learn how to fix HVACs to multiple years of acaedmia to become a medical doctor). People who know college is a waste of time for their career are clearly smart because they aren't wasting their time or money. If they wanted to learn something for their own edification and personal growth, they can go borrow a book for free from the library and read it in their leisure. I stand by my previous use of truly stupid. (and to be perfectly honest, I think a lot of people are stupid for going to college because so few even know what they are doing there other than they're "supposed" to be there)

I disagree. When you have all this societal pressure that tells you 'in order to be successful, you HAVE to go to college', if you end up going and it's a mistake for you, it doesn't make you stupid. It might make you less than perfectly adept at self-examination, but what teenager is?

Unless the teachers tie a grade to the metric, this probably won't change students' behavior any. If the student is a procrastinator or just plain lazy, they won't change overnight just because they know the teacher knows how long they looked (or didn't) at their textbook.

In a distance learning environment, however, It might let the teacher know if a student was cheating on exams, if it time-stamps book access. With my distance learning courses, I would have the book open in a separate window while taking the test to look up any questions i didn't know. With this, the teacher could actually enforce the "closed book" test rule by comparing the book access time-stamp against the test submission time-stamp.

This only works if the ebook also prevents printing pages... which only works if it prevents taking screenshots of pages.... ... which only works if it has control of the OS

If you ask me whether I'm letting an ebook reader / online course system control my OS... no, I'm not. On the other hand, I'm not taking online courses, either.

Let's assume the teacher can get an automated report. If they flag the report to let them know the amount of reading done by students get 69% or below, they can reach out to the students. Or more likely, when the student comes to them begging for mercy or extra credit, they can turn the discussion to one about study habits.

That there may be the key point for faculty. Having a heads up can be useful when students come knocking.

/side note

I love when the conversation goes like this:

Student: Can we have extra credit? I need an extra 2 percent to get the next letter grade.Teacher: Didn't you ask me for extra credit a month ago?Student: Yes.Teacher: Did I give you such an assignment?Student: Yes... /worry filling his voiceTeacher: Did you complete that EC assignment?Student: No....Teacher: Well, that was your extra 2 percent. You should have taken them then when you asked for and received the assignment.

/paraphrase of actual conversations. These seem to repeat every semester.

This is just one more sign – or more accurately one more symptom – of the dysfunction that is threaded and woven into our modern system of education here in America. I know myself to be biased on this subject, having always hated going to school, with the exception of the for-profit college I graduated from, but I think that biased or not I believe I can still identify what the problems in our schools revolve around.

The problem is apathy. Our system of education is more and more being based around the concepts of mass production that were pioneered in the late 1800s and early 1900s in manufacturing. There is an impersonal one-size-fits-all attitude that pervades thr great majority of our places of learning. I concede that it is not *easy* to get students to be interested in the various subjects of their studies, but it is critical that we at least try.

Better to spend time and money trying to make classes engaging than to try and push stopgap measures like this through. We've become so focused, obsessed even, with test scores, and more broadly with trying to quantify both people and pedagogy numerically. In doing so we neglect the most critical pieces of the puzzle that the educational process requires to be truly successful: growing and nurturing a personal relationship between student and teacher and presenting material in a manner that is interesting and seemingly relevant to a student's life.

As for the practical aspects of this concept, I have a few thoughts. First, I sincerely hope that this is not in and of itself a determining factor in a student's grades. The expansion of the student's knowledge would be the ideal thing upon which to form the student's grades, but that is incredibly unlikely any time soon, so in lieu I suggest that the work and performance in class be the material that is judged.

The point I am getting at is that this could be enormously misleading if it is used as a 'primary source' when determining a student's grades. Some students may not need to read the text much, perhaps because they learn more effectively verbally or by physical practice, or perhaps because they have already learned that subject in a previous class. An example of the latter is that I went through learning the basics of algebra a grand total of three times, twice in high school and once in grade school, and even so I had in truth learned it from my parents years before I took any formal class.

Instead this should be used as an *adjunct* to the traditional grading process. If somebody fails a test or does poorly on their homework, *only then* should this tool be consulted. That way the teacher will know whether the student just blew off learning the subject and failed as a result or whether they in truth studied very hard but still have a limited or flawed grasp of the concepts involved, and would need perhaps some extra one-on-one training after school.

The ease with which this could be gamed is another reason to limit it to explaining why somebody performed poorly, or performed well. For example, sure, you could just pretend to read it and turn the 'page' every now and then. But less obviously, what if I am a student and I accidentally leave the app open in the background on my iPhone. What then? If the information is finely grained, then perhaps the app could determine that it was running in the background, but if not, my time-score for the text would be massively inflated! And not out of malice either, but simply carelessness.... but how would the teacher know that? For all they know I might be deliberately trying to game it as I mentioned, wih all the possible negative things that could spawn in the teacher's mind.

Bottom line: concentrate resources on fixin our broken system, and since this cat is already out of the bag, use it with extreme caution, preferably not as a primary grading criterion.

A professor of mine once asked everyone in the room to grab the spine of the (paperback) book with two fingers and hold it up. That was freshman year. After that demonstration, I always made sure that if I didn't do the reading, I at least spread open the pages as if I did.

For those that haven't seen this demonstration, you can tell exactly how far someone's read in a paperback that way. The pages that have been read fan open. The other pages remain packed together. In the example above, only one person in the class apparently had bothered to read the whole book.

But... as you can tell from the example, you can only catch any student(s) once using this system. After that, they'll figure out how to game it.

I only ever read the books in college if the professor tested things that weren't talked about in the lectures. I always got lot more out of going to every single class, listening, and taking ridiculously over-detailed notes, than I ever did from the books. Hell, half the classes I took, I never once even opened the books and passed with flying colors.

Care to name any, along with an explanation of why? It's not like this is some surreptitious thing that's installed without your knowledge, it's a part of a course that you have voluntarily signed up for and are paying for.

I only ever read the books in college if the professor tested things that weren't talked about in the lectures. I always got lot more out of going to every single class, listening, and taking ridiculously over-detailed notes, than I ever did from the books. Hell, half the classes I took, I never once even opened the books and passed with flying colors.

If this was enforced, it would've messed up the entire way I learn.

This is a perfect illustration of my point about using this tool to explain a bad grade, not as a 'primary source' that by itself contributes to or otherwise influences a student's final grade. There are many models that differentiate between differing methods of learning that are most effective for a given person. I think the most widely-known example is the system that classifies people as visual, auditory, or tactile learners. It's a simplistic and reductionist view, but despite that it is no less valid or effective, being substantiated scientifically.

Care to name any, along with an explanation of why? It's not like this is some surreptitious thing that's installed without your knowledge, it's a part of a course that you have voluntarily signed up for and are paying for.

WRONG. I have involuntarily been forced to pay ever-increasing amounts for "education" such as whatever portion of my money is taken from me to pay for schools, tax writeoffs, or student grants which buy into this crap. Most of my money is spent without my knowledge and I wouldn't have even known about this new way to spend money forcefully taken from me had I not been overlooking lots of other waste to learn more about this one.